Long and quite dense review of Harvey Sachs' Schoenberg: Why He Matters, looks interesting if you like that sort of thing; I do, so added to my Christmas "hint dropping" list.
Challenging music is a tough sell because there has been about a hundred years of a critical mass of composers who took the metric of "challenging" and made it a target.
That created a lot of noise that's not of the compelling type. And while it's not so pretentious that, say, the music accidentally sounds outside of the human frequency range, it's pretentious enough to make non-musickers question whether there's really any there there.
Music cognition is still a young enough science to leave questions lingering about what is and isn't happening on a musical-perception level.
Also-- not sure I've ever seen this talked about, but music perception shares sensory apparatus with one's general sense of hearing. So challenging music with unfamiliar timbres and frequency combinations can be physically grating and overload the listener on that sensory level. It's difficult to be open to new, unfamiliar musical forms, and probably impossibly so if one is grumpy because the delivery format makes one feel as if the music is actively hurting one's ears.
Techno and heavy metal have completely traditional harmony and rhythm. Sure, the instruments have massive distortion and new sounds, but the "big blocks" are completely familiar to the brain, unlike avant-garde classical music which can completely abandon recognizable rhythm and 12TET.
> Techno and heavy metal have completely traditional harmony and rhythm.
This depends very heavily on which subgenre of techno you're talking about. Melodic techno tends to use functional harmony, yes. But there is a lot of techno out there that has no recognizable harmony at all. It may have a root note, but bass and/or melodic lines, if present at all, can be completely chromatic.
Rhythm is almost always 4/4, of course, but it's hard to deviate too far from that with dance music. Within that, techno tends to do a lot of interesting polymeter stuff. Whether you consider that traditional or not is, I guess, open to interpretation.
The case against serialism is easy. Tone rows are a pointless conceit. They turn composition into a crossword puzzle.
It's a worthless constraint. There is nothing you can do with tone rows - retrogrades, inversions, permutations, all of it - that you can't do in free atonality.
There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements.
As for popularity - you can find abstract expressionist paintings for sale on Etsy. You won't find much hard serial music on Bandcamp. And it's pretty easy to generate it with software now.
But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations.
Schoenberg desperately wanted to be remembered as a great innovator. He didn't care if audiences loved or hated the music, as long as his name was out there was an Important Composer.
> There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements.
Nothing of this sort happened except in very exceptional cases where it's very obvious and clearly intentional, such as Alban Berg (who chose adversarially tonal tone rows). Besides you assume the only benefit you get from serialism is atonality but that makes no sense because many composers used tonal rows too (i.e. tone rows with 7 or 9 pitch classes in the Major or Minor system). Not only that but different composers used serialism for different purposes.
You are however right that Schoenberg assumed 12 tone serialism implies some form of atonality, which is incorrect. Research shows that he had a bias towards atonal tone rows.
Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music. It's fair to classify this as the "art" part of writing serialistic pieces that theory is insufficient.
Besides all of this, traditional music theory teaching focuses too much on serialism as a "technique" and not enough as a "structure", which was the main point of Schoenberg. For example, Elliot Carter claims he doesn't intentionally use row vectors or row matrices in his compositions, but his works can certainly be analyzed and understood this way. It seems like for a minor subset of free atonal compositions serialism is the natural structure of this kind of music. This point is often missed.
I firmly disagree with your points about Schoenberg. I think he's one of the two gigantic innovators of music in 20th century: Philip Glass and him. (I understand this is extremely controversial, opinions are mine). It really takes a lot to make artistic statements so profound your works look misplaced in your canon but are still firmly part of it.
I still hold out hope that someday Harry Partch will get the recognition he deserves. If traditional Western harmony is played out, surely the obvious solution is adding more notes? It makes more sense to me than trying to wring out the last few drops of novelty using Schoenberg's ideas. Partch demonstrated that microtonal works can sound both pleasant and novel, but musicians are strangely resistant to the idea.
One exception is Sevish, who produces some of the most interesting electronic dance and ambient music I've heard. Example:
One can also explore inharmonic timbres - the kinds of timbres that are naturally produced by cymbals, gongs, bells, drumheads etc. William Sethares has convincingly shown that one can compute inharmonic timbres that will make "weird" tunings/scales that are not based on the harmonic series sound "in tune", and usable as music. (This has to be done by minimizing a prediction of psychoacoustic "roughness" for the given tuning/scale; to some extent, it's a trial and error process.)
He has a book about it - Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale. Unfortunately, I don't know of anyone who has tried to reproduce his results and make them more easily approachable for broader use, at least not thus far.
Ableton Live is about to release a new update with a comprehensive, well-integrated means of working in non-standard scales and custom micro-tuning. Hopefully this will lower the technical barrier to entry among contemporary musicians enough to broaden it's usage.
Ableton Live already has Microtuner (https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/microtuner/), I haven't heard it being used much though. Also, Bitwig released the Micro-Pitch device years ago.
I am curious whether a better Live integration is going to lead to more usage.
I somewhat disagree with your assessment. I don't think the next phase after traditional Western harmony is a wider adoption of microtonal music.
What we see more and more of is an increased reliance on aspects that were previously less explored in the traditional (orchestral) Western music, such as texture and rhythm. Even in academic music, but mostly in cross-genre acoustic/electronic production.
Me too. It's not a convincing direction for art music imho. This is my biggest criticism of Ligeti. I don't think he needed that detuned flute in his Violin Concerto. Otherwise love his music to my bones.
It's true that a lot of microtonal music is gimmicky, but I think that's the fault of the composers, not the tuning systems. Do you find barbershop music gimmicky? The defining feature of the genre (harmonic seventh chords) is microtonal.
Just intonation is an unusual choice for Bach's works. I'm not aware of any evidence that he used it, and he certainly thought about tuning. His "Well Tempered Clavier" was meant as a demonstration of some unknown tuning system that was more flexible than the various meantone temperaments that were common in his time. But there are approximations of meantone using just intervals, so it's certainly possible that people have performed it that way.
But this sort of just intonation is not like barbershop, because all the intervals can be tolerably approximated with 12-equal temperament. The mood of the piece will change somewhat as some become more and some become less consonant, but it will remain essentially the same work. The barbershop seventh chord cannot be so approximated. The "ringing" sound of the seventh chord that defines the genre doesn't occur unless the seventh is tuned very noticeably flat from the closest 12-equal temperament equivalent. If you arpeggiate a barbershop seventh chord it sounds obviously microtonal.
Music theory has the concept of "octave equivalence", where changing the pitch of a note up or down by an octave does not change its function. This means it's possible to enumerate all the functionally distinct harmonies available in standard Western tuning. There are 12 distinct pitch classes. One of these must be the lowest note in the harmony, so there are 11 remaining pitch classes that could optionally be included or omitted. If all are omitted it's just a single note not a harmony, so there are 2^11-1 = 2047 functionally distinct harmonies.
Most of them are of little musical utility, but you could conceivably use and have opinions about them all. This is not possible with literature. There are far more than 2047 functionally distinct sentences, so there is no need to add more letters to the alphabet.
> If all are omitted it's just a single note not a harmony, so there are 2^11-1 = 2047 functionally distinct harmonies. Most of them are of little musical utility, but you could conceivably use and have opinions about them all.
Unrelated but it reminded me of this [0] article discussed on HN a few times.
> If all are omitted it's just a single note not a harmony, so there are 2^11-1 = 2047 functionally distinct harmonies.
You're omitting time. Harmonic perception is highly contextual. The way a chord sounds will depend heavily on the chords that precede it, so it's not just a question of enumerating the chords. You have to enumerate the chord progressions, and their rhythms. That's a much larger number.
> Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music.
There are ways to address this however. One can add small-scale atonal elements to an otherwise tonal work, in a way that can be understood by the ear. I think this may account for why Webern is perhaps the most popular among the atonal and serial composers: his works are small-scale enough that one can at least think about what grokking them musically may be like. Same for the 'freely atonal' works of early Schoenberg. So it was nowhere near the total failure some people might think it was, just not the be-all and end-all.
Interesting point re: technique vs structure. Structure is in general a much harder aspect to both master and innovate in.
I am curious, why do you consider Glass a more innovative composer than, say, Reich? Reich's counterpoint and phase music seem to have pushed music forward more noticeably than Glass (outside of, perhaps, Einstein on the Beach).
I don't find Reich as convincing because I don't think he was prolific enough and canonical (with respect to forms he used) enough to make the profound statement Glass was able to pull off with his Violin Concertos, String Quartets and Operas [1]. Really, I see art as a tradition and Glass managed to put WCM (mostly concertos, symphonies, quartets, operas, solo piano really...) in the most novel context since Schoenberg. Reich is a great composer, but it's a tremendously harder pursuit to innovate within the tradition rather than reject it all and restart.
Also you talk about counterpoint and incidentally early Glass sounds very contrapuntal (like early Reich) but I think a core message in Glass' body of works is that this entire bike shedding on harmony is so silly. There is so much to music beyond just pitch, and you can literally pick 4 chords and go crazy with it. He treats harmony as a solved problem. I think Reich would agree with this but I don't think his message is as profound. Think about Adams' "Harmonielehre" where he claims he wanted to combine minimalism and early 20th century harmony. The problem here I see here is that common practice harmony revolves around richness and variety. Fux himself says as much. It sounds gorgeous and new, but it doesn't go a long way to innovate anything. Although Glass' music sounds unserious, he actually tried to force himself to innovate. Which is what Schoenberg tried to do. Restrictions motivate artists to be creative.
Listen to Glass first string quartet, it was composed in 1966 before Reich's phase music.
[1] And of course his piano etudes but pianists insist they serve no pedagogical purpose, even though I still can't find someone who can actually play them well except Maki Namekawa. Roll eyes.
Interesting distinction you make between experimental composers and those with _some_ desire to appeal to a broader audience, or at least some conventional sensibility. I think the same applies to contemporary music - while I personally find great pleasure in the moment listening to free jazz, noise, and ambient music, it is ephemeral and soon forgotten. The music that I find memorable, that truly haunts me, has elements of the experimental, but is still fundamentally melodic. My Bloody Valentine might be a good example.
"But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations."
But weren't audience expectations tainted by the musical establishment? Debussy (born 1862) won the Prix de Rome, but somehow Ravel (born 1875, one year after Schoenberg) was snubbed for five consecutive years.
Something terrible seems to have happened in music schools around the turn of the century. It's hard to blame Schoenberg for wanting to watch it all burn.
I majored in flute performance in college, and have listened / played a lot of avante garde music. My roommate, a bass player, and I were really into it at the time. We once played Shoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire on a tape loop over and over for an entire week -- and emerged with our sanity mostly intact. (An interesting side fact is that now I can barely recall it.) I played Luciano Berio's Sequenza on my Sr. recital. In retrospect, I think I was mostly relishing playing the role of enfant terrible, playing weird music just to get a rise out of people.
These days I don't willingly listen to atonal music of the Shoenberg/Carter/Boulez variety. I have a variety of theories about why modern classical music tends to be rejected, but in the end, all I can really say is that I have a subjective response to, say, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, that's entirely different from his Movements for Piano & Orchestra.
Luciano Berio's Sequenza aren't traditionally considered serialist (absolutely gorgeous and stunning set of compositions BTW). Although he certainly "sounds" serialist "as a style" the same way Elliot Carter is a "serialist" even though he claims he never used it as a "technique".
I really like your point with respect to "Rite of Spring" vs his "Movements for Piano & Orchestra". But let's please note that he likely never attempted to invoke the same kind of vibe anyway, so I don't think it really proves anything. The reality is, composers used serialistic techniques for something other than what neoclassicists wanted to create. For a better comparison, compare Elliot Carter's late piano works with his first piano sonata, which he wanted to write in neoclassical style. You can see the same Carter hue (that's likely more similar to "Movements for Piano & Orchestra" than Stravinsky's "Violin Concerto") in both so it's a more direct comparison in my very humble opinion.
With respect to:
> why modern classical music tends to be rejected
I find this claim that contemporary Western classical music is irrelevant wrong. I think its cultural force is significant. I wrote more about this in HN here [1] if you care to read. But in short, just because an artistic movement inspires artists and not the audience, it doesn't mean it won't indirectly impact the audience, since artists who will go and create mainstream art may be inspired by the innovators of their era.
You ended up listening to Schoenberg at his best, and Sequenza is also a pretty good piece. As a composer and pianist/harpsichordist, my theory on this is that at some point, modern classical music became postmodern in terms of rejecting the concept of objectivity and beauty in the experience of music. That allowed composers to write truly horrible garbage with an air of superiority because "you just don't understand it" if you don't like it. This seems to have been a largely failed experiment: there are things that you can do in a piece of music that are more beautiful than other things, even if there is some subjectivity in terms of exact taste.
Ironically, the current period of music is starting to be called "postmodern" music, but it's returning a bit to the harmonic aesthetics of the romantic period (not purely, it's mixed with music from around the world as well as jazz and pop/rock ideas) and innovating more around music production technology - like adding electronics to the orchestra and experimenting with microtonal instruments - rather than trying to innovate on the concept of harmony itself. I would assume that this is in no small part due to the influence of film scoring, which is largely considered pedestrian by hardcore modernists, on the new generation of composers.
By the way, I happen to like a lot of the modernist stuff that I am rejecting here, but I think that's more out of familiarity (through study) than anything else.
"There is plenty of good music left to be written in C major." - Schoenberg
I got that from Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, an accessible history of 20th century composition. I went in ready to dislike Schoenberg but I walked away pretty charmed with him. I don't enjoy listening to any of his serial pieces, but I loved the twinkly little notes that play in Zelda BOTW when you're riding your horse. I don't claim that there's a _direct_ line from 12 tone rows to that, but overall I like living in the post-Schoenberg world where I hear a lot of the "intrepid elements of atonality, pointillist riffs" that the Atlantic author points to.
What do you think about the application of his theory to film scores? I’m immediately reminded of Jerry Goldsmith’s work for Planet of the Apes. Extremely atonal and alien, that score is really effective at putting the audience off-balance and feeling unsettled. I love it!
You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too. Rules are a "pointless conceit" by definition. "Free atonality" can, again by definition, do anything it wants, including emiting a J. S. Bach fugue or whatever. This is a tautological case.
In fact the whole point to music is rules. We have expectations about what we hear and how that works and what it means, and you write "new" music by breaking or bending just a few of them, or otherwise finding ways to do stuff other people haven't.
And Schoenberg was trying to find a way to write a new set of rules. It didn't catch on, for the most part, but it wasn't "pointless". You can hear tone rows and learn the rules and "understand" a 12-tone piece in ways that you can't for arbitrary noise. And that's kinda cool.
> You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too.
You really can't. They aren't laws of nature, but they are based on observation: "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character. Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that." "When I frustrate a leading tone, it makes the harmonic effect less clear."
Schoenberg's system starts with the arbitrary: pick a tone row and use it! But there are rules based on observation there, too: if you use tonal constructions in atonal music, it frustrates the listener's expectations, so don't do that. The ear can recognize the rows when transposed, reversed, and altered by other techniques, so those are good. Serialism is less fully-developed and lacks the deep cultural background of tonal music, but it's not entirely arbitrary either.
> "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character."
This is partly true, but that rule (as with many other rules of strict composition) originated with purely vocal music which had to be made easy to sing. There's plenty of music for instruments like the piano or the guitar (even literate music, starting from the early 20th c. or so) where consecutive fifths are played all the time and such a "blending" effect is not really heard. Probably a result of timbre (these instruments have a bit of perceptual "roughness" to them that helps prevent a blended tone) as well as musical context (when consecutive fifths are just part of the music, that kind of sound is expected and easier to understand for the listener).
From my read of "Theory of Harmony" and "Structural Functions of Harmony", it seems to me Schoenberg definitely wasn't aiming to be a great innovator, he was desperate to be part of the great tradition and saw serialism as an inevitable consequence of the way in which tonality was being stretched further and further in particular by Wagner and Schoenberg's great hero, Mahler. Schoenberg came up with the idea of serialism because he felt there needed to be some sort of formal constraint to give structure to the music in the absence of harmony because he felt the sense of a tonic was being stretched to breaking point anyway and would inevitably fail. People came up with other ways to provide this structure once the whole serialist -> integral serialist process had worked its way through.
Saying there's nothing you can't do in serialism you can't do in free atonality seems unfair. Firstly free atonality came about after integral serialism. Secondly, there's nothing you can do in any type of musical composition that you can't do in free atonality, so you may as well say all the things you can do with functional harmony are a worthless constraint.
As for popularity - I personally don't think that's an important characteristic at all, but if you do, there are lots of serialist works that are very popular (eg Wozzeck[1]).
[1] And I deliberately chose that one rather than say Berg's violin concerto which is also very popular because that's one of the ones that you're accusing of mining serialism for tonal elements
I think the question why contemporary music intimidates or infuriates people could be expanded to art as well.
As someone who studied art and film I found that even extremely powerful experimental works of music, art or film will have critics like these. Don't get me wrong: One doesn't has to like every piece of art. But even without liking it one could still respect the expression, the craft, the energy and/or the thought contained within a work. There is a lot of great art that I don't like.
The problem many people have with these modern things is that they think of art as something one can "parse" into a specific intended meaning. So once you encounter unparseable art, chances are you will feel stupid. Or worse, you feel the artwork "calls" you stupid.
But a lot of art simply is, while the intention is completely secondary. Nobody would look at a nice sunset and be upset at the fact that it doesn't have a clear meaning behind it. This lack of meaning is very easy to ignore with art which you think is nice (e.g. a painting of said sunset). For more art-headed people the same painting of a sunset would be boring, or even kitsch — what does the painting show, that I couldn't see better in real and nature? Then I'd rather see something completely unseen, a new painting technique, a motive I have never thought about etc.
You know, ten years into marriage here, my wife has really turned me onto David Lynch. I hadn't paid much attention to his work before meeting her. I at least saw the most popular films one day and vaguely felt like I didn't get them, but there was nothing there I'd identify as bad filmmaking or anything. It just seemed like it was trying to say something and I wasn't getting it.
I no longer feel that way at all. I don't know what flipped. It may have been learning that Lynch primarily considers himself a painter and he also does a lot of sculpture. He just makes movies and television shows because those are better at paying the bills. But it seemed pretty obvious after comparing the differences between all of the extended universe novelization material Mark Frost produced related to Twin Peaks with David Lynch's answers when asked if any of that is canon when he just says he doesn't care and doesn't even know what the extra content is.
There is no hidden meaning I was failing to get. Lynch isn't trying to say anything at all. Was Dale Cooper literally living in a dream the whole time? It doesn't matter. He's just a painter but film happens to be his medium. He's creating impressions, in a series sufficiently coherent from one to the next that it can be considered a story, but it's not like reading Robert Jordan or something. There is no vast encyclopedia of notes and in-universe history where what was really happening the whole time is explained. It's just impressionism on film. At some point, I became okay with that and stopped falling into the Reddit fan-theory holes with everything I watch. It became okay to just appreciate the quality of the images and acting performances and realize this is fiction. It doesn't have to be constrained by the logical causal physics of reality. It can tell stories with dream logic even if the point of that isn't to say you're literally watching the dreams of another person who inhabits some physically real world that you aren't shown.
This is it. Why are there three birds (crows?) above that field in Van Gogh's painting?
The answer is: who cares — they bring something to the painting, and no explaination would greatly change that. Maybe a definite explaination would even hurt the mystery and thus the reception.
The value of some art lies in what it means to you, the mental doors it opens or the emotions it tingles. All of this can be so subjective that any explaination is ultimately without any real value.
Sure it is interesting to know if Van Gogh used those birds elsewhere, or what they might represent for himself, with his moving biography. But when I am looking at that picture, all of that is not important.
> The problem many people have with these modern things is that they think of art as something one can "parse" into a specific intended meaning.
No, I think that is a prejudice of people who think they are better at appreciating art than others.
Normal people like abstract art, experimental music, and other stuff that is different and open for interpretation – as long as it's good.
But they don't like subpar productions made by talentless people, just because these people have gone through all the superficial rites of becoming "artists" and have a community of group-narcissists to feed on.
is it a prejudice when a very common "critique" is "I didn't get it"? A lot of people want something concrete to get. They became used to a very narrow set of structures and expectations. They think they getting it or not makes the work good or bad.
> Culturally curious people, young and old, seem to accept that a “challenging” painting—or modern dance work, or play, or independent film—can be exciting, mind-expanding, really cool, and sort of out there precisely because it’s challenging. Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating?
I think that misses that a lot of "challenging" music that isn't Schoenberg is very widely accepted. Composers like Glass or Cage are popular enough to be used in film soundtracks.
I don't think there's necessary anything about music over visyal arts that means people don't like "challenging" or "experimental" music, but Schoenberg for whatever reason hasn't ever reached a wide level of popularity.
Culturally curious people, young and old, seem to accept that a “challenging” painting—or modern dance work, or play, or independent film—can be exciting, mind-expanding, really cool, and sort of out there precisely because it’s challenging. Why in classical contemporary music do so many people equate challenging with intimidating—or even infuriating?
Music is different to other art forms.
Not everyone likes dance, not everyone likes paintings, not everyone likes theatre, not everyone likes sculpture, not everyone likes poetry.
But EVERYONE likes music.
Its fundamental. So when its challenging music, its challenging in a more fundamental way than a painting can be challenging.
Even if you were to label it as such, how would that prove the original point? Labeling a trait as a medical condition does not make it vanish. If that alleged 3-5% of the population does not share the trait that you claim is universal, then that trait is simply not universal, regardless of what status or judgement you decide to assign to whatever commonality those alleged 3-5% of the population have. The two matters are completely orthogonal.
Well put. Also, Vladimir Nabokov famously did not like music, or perhaps more accurately, was completely indifferent to it. I've never heard this ascribed to a medical condition. And I've met one or two people in my life who claimed not to like music.
The difference with visual arts is, because of the way the market works avant-garde artists can still be financially hugely successful, and their works are correspondingly feted and displayed in the gallery temples. So people are more prone to be intimidated away from criticising what they don't understand, as you can't really argue with money in this society, and it projects influence and power anyway. If contemporary classical composers were mysteriously making millions from their work, they'd probably be treated similarly.
Also, contemporary classical is really just a small slice of avant garde music nowadays, another thing articles like this never seem to get.
I was hoping this would be more about encouraging people to listen to music that is generally outside of what they usually listen to. For some this would be jazz, others heavy metal, or even country music (which many profess to hate).
I've introduced a number of friends to American old time music, the progenitor of bluegrass and modern country music, who have discovered that there's in fact a lot of wonderful country music.
Usually those types of pieces have an "eat your vegetables" vibe to them. While it may be good advice (and is, in the case of vegetables) people generally don't listen to music to be challenged.
They're seeking familiarity, comfort, joy -- which are hard to find in "challenging" music, whether that's genres that they don't care for or more experimental music that defies conventions.
I'll take this opportunity to plug the movie "Untitled" (2009) by Jonathan Parker, a light comedy poking loving fun at contemporary art.
The lead character is an avant-garde composer, with a strong belief in the importance of his work, ignoring (as best he can) the mockery of others, and resisting the calls from most of those who care about him to use some melody in his work.
Nahre Sol recently put out a video on contemporary classical music [1] that, while attempting to correct common misconceptions and generally promote it, basically reaffirmed my dislike of the genre. The music really speaks for itself, I don’t see myself ever wanting to listen to this type of music, and no essay or other rationalization is going to change the way that I feel when I hear it.
And while I don’t begrudge the individual composers and performers who do make this sort of music - they are of course free to follow their own curiosity and passions - it does upset me a bit that this where “classical” music has ended up. It feels like the academics have hijacked the genre to the detriment of casual listeners.
If you consider Cage, Stockhausen and Glass part of the western classical music tradition, then I think we should consider composers like Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds, Richard Skelton and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith part of that continuum. There are people making interesting, innovative music that isn't academic or needlessly avant garde, that I think can appeal to everyone.
I'm sorry to say this but there is no such thing as "needlessly avant garde" in Western classical music tradition imho. WCM is about an artist finding his own sound, finding a unique musical language that puts them in the continuum all the way from Bach to him. If your music is not avant garde, it may be great music, but it's not going to be good WCM music. This is just my humble opinion. I almost exclusively listen to contemporary WCM these days, and the way I engage with WCM is different than the way I engage with other genres of music.
Put it as film analogy, the goal is not to make the best horror movie, the best drama, the best scifi; the goal is to make the most creative/innovative/novel/personal/weird movie that happens to be horror, that happens to be drama, that happens to be scifi. At least that's how I enjoy WCM. Everybody experiences music differently, which is what makes it one of the most beautiful human phenomena.
So in short, the more avant garde the better. Note that Schoenberg's music is already grandpa's grandpa music. We want innovation that goes well well beyond Schoenberg. I would consider 12 tone row music ancient at this point, not even remotely avant garde/experimental.
I find it really weird when people just run with this misconception that western literate music somehow started with Bach, as if what people were playing before was something different and not really music. One can clearly hear continuity between late Renaissance and early Baroque style (17th c.) and even how the secular music of the later Middle Ages (the sources of which are sadly a bit too obscure, hence why it's not often performed even as 'early' music) was carried over into the early Renaissance. Bach's style was highly individual, blending highly developed structures and forms of earlier Renaissance music with the fully developed tonality of the later Baroque and the earliest elements of 18th c. ("galant, classical") style.
It was just a shorthand. Of course everybody knows it didn't start with Bach, duh. He is a very central figure though, and any work you'll put into an artistic tradition will inevitably be compared to the greats of the tradition.
Most listeners are more interested in music conveying emotion, than novelty. If novelty is all WCM has to offer, it is not surprising that it has a dwindling audience.
There is definitely a lot wrong with the classical music scene in general (speaking as a classical pianist - in training). Most notably elitism/classism. I guess classical music also has lots of image problems and just has trouble finding its place in the world. Between the fact that in the last 200 years we've started to actually play and listen to older music (not to mention composing in older styles), the advent of sound recording and then the information age or whatever, it's understandable, really.
I myself just feel lucky that I can enjoy most of this "challenging" music without needing to care about the magnificently strict structure, or how the composer wanted to channel God or something. All I ask is that people not question my sanity on the grounds of my liking of this kind of music.
The classism/elitism problem is much more an image problem foisted/reinforced by pop culture than it is a real, inherent issue. When all you hear of classical music is on TV shows where it represents "the rich, elitist villain" or on ads for luxury goods, people reverse the association arrow.
How many people who perceive classical music as elitist actually have a personal experience of someone on the "inside" acting elitist and shunning them as "outsiders"?
Historically, literate music has always been confined to elite settings. The common people played folk tunes transmitted orally, and later "popular" songs and dances when mass publishing of sheet music became a possibility.
(There's actually no reason nowadays why this published "popular" music shouldn't become a part of the literate canon that's researched academically etc. But that only adds to a very long list of individual composers and entire musical traditions that end up being broadly neglected by standard academic POV's. It's also a general problem wrt. the study of human art and culture.)
I don't doubt it. However my point is that the scene is so small that direct interactions with the community hardly moves the needle when it comes to the broader cultural perception.
I'm a parent of two classical musicians in training, and I took cello lessons through high school. Today, I'm a jazz bassist, and a scientist by day.
I wonder if the cost and competitiveness of the training has something to do with the problem. The people who can win auditions are in fact elite musicians, and are almost exclusively from affluent families.
I enjoy the challenging music too, in the jazz genre. Given that I'm not trying to make a living at it, I'm grateful for the fact that I can play for a tiny but appreciative and loyal audience. I think there are a lot of niche genres that are sustained largely by amateurs and hobbyists.
>The music really speaks for itself, I don’t see myself ever wanting to listen to this type of music, and no essay or other rationalization is going to change the way that I feel when I hear it.
One could say that for Mozart or Bach (or the Beatles or Miles Davis or Bieber) just as well, as the argument basically amounts to personal taste, doesn't it?
I think it's a valid point. Mozart and Beethoven's music was at the end of the day made to appeal to mass audiences. Although considered niche now, Mozart was quite the celebrity in his day and had a loyal base of (mostly female) followers. Whereas modern classical is meant to appeal to musicians, not a mass audiences.
We forget that although there are many surviving transcripts of their work, Mozart and Beethoven also improvised and performed on stage a lot. That whole genre of classical music is lost.
Mozart's music was considered too edgy and quirky in his day, actually. People who were knowledgeable about music tended to like it a lot because they could follow all the twists and turns, but Salieri was the more popular composer with the mass public. The story with Beethoven is not very different, ultimately some of the simplest pieces of his were the most popular and he wasn't very happy about that.
> The story with Beethoven is not very different, ultimately some of the simplest pieces of his were the most popular and he wasn't very happy about that.
I'm sure many artists fall into the trap of 'the public likes the work I like least'. That doesn't make the work not part of the authors creation. For example, Raffi makes extremely popular (and actually pretty good) music and I'm sure he absolutely hates having to play it over and over again. Still a better artist than Schoenberg.
If you read some reactions and reviews for music from Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, in their time, it is not much different than someone now hearing contemporary classical music.
Lovers of modern classical music have been trying to sell it to the mainstream for a century and failed. 100 years after Bach, Mozart, Beerhoven, Brahms, Saint-Saens, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and others wrote their seminal works, the audiences got them; in most cases they got them as soon as they came out or within a few years.
Schoenberg and his followers are dancing to a different tune, and that’s fine for them, but at this point it’s pretty clear that they will at best be remembered for their tangential effects on composers of actually beloved music.
Why does the mainstream get invoked in these types of arguments when no one called them? Who cares? There's hundreds upon hundreds of classical composers who didn't really survive into popularity who wrote standard good quality music for their time. Many people know of Haydn but who (who isn't a pianist) has ever heard of Kuhlau?
Not to mention Bach had to regain popularity through Mendelsshon.
This is debatable to say the least. Lovers of the avant-garde commonly trot out the argument that there's just no room for genuine, transformative innovation within the mainstream that can be grokked by average folk, that it is played out in some sense. And lovers of mainstream music (and arguably mainstream culture more generally) routinely prove them wrong, by managing to innovate within those boundaries in a way that's genuinely compelling to many. It happens again and again.
Many times what happens is that the "within" innovation is not so much innovation in itself, but the innovation is including aspects that were done by the avant-garde decades before, into a popular context.
avant-garde composers were playing with recording and editing techniques for a long time before the beatles came and used those ideas in a more catchy way, with a hairstyle to boot. The innovation is closer to the business side than to the music itself.
> Why does the mainstream get invoked in these types of arguments when no one called them?
Oh, I must have gotten lost. I thought I was in a forum dedicated to hacking where a post had been submitted to justify the importance of a composer almost universally found difficult to listen to to a mainstream audience. Probably took a wrong turn somewhere.
> Who cares?
Whoever posted the story here clearly did one way or another. Everyone who commented, both of us included, as well. Affecting detachment while taking the time to clearly post how detached one is is not very convincing.
I think importance can be recognized without appealing to the average Bad Bunny listener.
I care about the music, people should be more open to hearing challenging music. That doesn't necessarily mean "the mainstream", that entails a whole cabal of mechanisms at play that go beyond what an individual chooses to listen and how.
Also many now revered composers were shunned by audiences of their time, such as Mahler.
Bach is now regarded as the greatest composer but he wasn't exactly popular during his life outside select circles.
Music as a whole clearly decided to go in a direction deliberately away from what any "normal" person would like. They dress it up in plenty of other words, but it's clear by the way nothing will attract their disdain like anything that a normal person might like that this is certainly a core component of where academic music decided to go. I know this from personal experience. They don't even particularly hide it if it's not the direct topic of conversation, it is only denied when directly challenged, a sort of psychological motte & bailey ploy.
That's fine. That's all their right, even the last bit. I'm hardly in a position to insist that disliking, or at the very least distrusting, something when the only thing I know about it is that it is popular is invalid myself. We take very different approaches to that, but I can't deny what I do is close enough that it would be hypocritical to criticize too much.
But it is pretty stupid to write handwringing articles about "Why don't they like us?" You collectively wrote music that blares in every tone that you don't want normies to like you. You chased them away for decades. You collectively berated and mocked them in both words and music.
What did you collectively expect?
I suppose those who joined in the process late and learned the methods of disdain without the reason underlying them might be confused, but I can promise those people that there is no scenario where the common person suddenly acquires a taste for music that basically musically reads as "screw the common person and everything they stand for", in addition to whatever else it may be saying.
If you want the normies to like you, you are going to have to at least inch closer to them first. Maybe the normies could use some mind-expansion, but right now you are so far away from where the normies are that you are barely on the same planet.
You don't want to. You're not going to. That's fine. All I'm really asking for is for you to stop being surprised about the results. When you tell people to fuck off, they do.
Although the general meanings of modern and contemporary are similar, in art they have different meanings. The production of modern art is considered to have ended in the 20th century, and contemporary art is being produced right now.
For a similar historical nomenclature, see the musical style ars nova or "new art." Ars nova continues to be called ars nova, even though the music was written in the 14th century.
There's an art to making the challenging accessible. Before listening to Take Five by Dave Brubek, I think most people never would have guessed that a 5/4 time signature could sound so natural.
It's mostly only Western European / American popular music that (for some reason thaf I don't quite understand) is obsessed with 4/4. In many other cultures (e.g. Eastern European folk music, but many others as well), irregular meters are quite common.
5/4 isn't that challenging of a time signature. I would argue it's just uncommon and so most people associate it with Take Five. 3/4 was extremely popular in Europe for centuries and is not perceived as challenging.
5/4 is actually ambiguous because the "5" can be any of 3+2, 2+3, 2+1+2 etc. Similar issues for 7/4, etc. 4/4, 3/4 and 6/8 may have rhythmic variations too (e.g. the 3+3+2 tresillo rhythm common in rock-and-roll music) but these don't impact the metrical understanding of the music to anything near that extent.
I'm not saying it's THAT challenging. It's not 13/2, but it is 5/2. Most 5/2 songs will sound unnatural to most people . It's ironic to make a comment like that in the context of an article like this one.
The article is making the case for challenging music. You pointed out that Brubeck made challenging music (i.e. 5/4) accessible to most people. My argument is that this is a poor example as 5/4 is not that of a challenging time signature, and most non-musicians who heard Take Five probably didn't even perceive the uncommon 5/4, and just enjoyed the tune. 5/4 is popular in progressive rock, post rock, and electronic music. In my experience most people do not pay attention to that. Similar to 3/4 - it's an uncommon but easy time signature that people in the Western world have no problem with. Basically, there is no challenge.
Performed by is a normal usage as well. See every pop musician who doesn't write their own music, performs it, and is commonly known by every human person to have ownership of that song.
5/4 is perfectly natural to a large percentage of people east of the Aegean. Almost the entirety of Anatolian folk music is 5/4 (or worse, 10/8, 9/2, etc.)
Calling a certain frequency "A4" is also in no way scientific. It's completely arbitrary! Just agree with the other people you're playing with. That's what really matters. Musicality is in ratios, not absolute values.
You said a <2% difference in tuning is a larger question than composition styles. Like, the difference between 440 and 432 is more important than the difference between Baroque, Romantic, Atonal, Beebop Jazz, and Death Metal. "What kind of music do you like?" "Oh literally any genre, as long as it's tuned to A4=440. If it's anything else I hate it." It's difficult for me to respond to such a statement and stay within the HN commenting guidelines. It's strange and surprising that this would be something anyone would ever argue with a straight face.
It does not matter. Here's some reasons why:
- You can change it at any point. Re-tune your orchestra. Pitch bend your mp3 file in Audacity. It's free to change your mind. Decisions which are free to change do not matter.
- Most humans basically don't notice it. The very few that do have a good enough ear to notice it will forget about it within seconds unless your song is extremely boring. If your listeners are focusing on a 2% difference in tuning instead of the content of your song, your song sucks.
- Written scores literally do not specify it; that's how little it matters. People do not have this in mind when they write music because it doesn't matter. They write the tempo, the key signature, the exact notes, but they don't write the exact tuning of A4. They don't care.
Repitching a file and tuning a whole orchestra to 432Hz are qualitatively different, claiming they are equivalent blurs a lot about sample rate and technological limitations in signal processing and signal recreation. Instruments tuned together resonate together, and the Schumann resonance is a fundamental resonance of earth, if you are multiples of that, you are going to resonate better. I think the convention that 440=432 is wrong, dangerous, and unscientific, and the claim that I can't say it with a straight face is weird because there is a paucity of research on how the different tunings affect us and the study of cymatics would suggest harmonious frequencies that live parallel to and not-on the 440Hz interval.
440 is the international standard as of around the 18th century iirc. Before that it varies a bit from 430-450hz depending on region and time period. 432 is mostly about preference although its origins go back to setting c as perfect integers. With this tuning c4 is 256hz, c5 512hz, etc whereas at a4=440 c4 is 261.63hz.
It’s ultimately just preference though. To that end some symphonies use other options, ny philharmonic uses 442, Boston symphony 441, etc. When I marched and teched drum corp we did 442 because that’s what the marimbas were tuned to plus we performed outside in the cold so going up a touch helped as the cold would generally pull everything flat.
Mike Verta is a Hollywood composer who has put out a lot of great videos on composition, and he makes great points on this (he has since become an insane alt-right nutjob, unfortunately, but his old videos are still up).
He tells a story about stopping at a red light next to a woman who was absolutely jamming out to some hip-hop song. Her car is shaking, she's shouting the lyrics with a big smile on her face, just completely engrossed in this music that everyone who considers themself a "composer" would turn their nose up at; not "real music", of course. And he thought: I would be elated if I pulled up and saw someone connecting like that to my music. Isn't that why I got into composing in the first place? To bring about that in people? Why else would you want to be a composer? To join the circle-jerk and feel infinitely superior to all those stupid normies?
Many of these composers write this way because they simply cannot write tonal music well. It's too hard. Writing music with original colors and style, but is still tonal and still resonates with actual human beings? That's tremendously difficult. Avant-garde composers avoid doing this because they can't. They write atonal shit because it's much, much easier.
The idea is that you've failed as a composer if the "common man" can relate at all to your music is one of the most elitist attitudes a human can possibly hold. Normal listeners' brains are so far beneath yours that if they can recognize any form of structure, melody, or harmony at all in your music, then it must be trash normie music. It's the exact premise of the Emperor's New Clothes story and it's amazing how long this bubble has lasted. Shame on everyone who thinks this way.
Imagine being the one who takes these "challenging" musical ideas and presents them in a way that listeners can actually intuitively understand. Imagine pulling in listeners with what they know, and then taking them on a journey into the previously unknown, and having them be with you the whole time. Now that's a damn-good modern composer! Of course, the vast majority of modern composers would wallow in despair if such a thing happened to their big-brained magnum opus -- normies understanding their music!?
You put into words my exact feeling. These composers have no skill. They are compared to Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, and Liszt but all those men were celebrities in their days... They made music people jammed to. Not anymore. It's part of a larger trend of artists embracing ugliness because industrialized arts education seems incapable of producing artists. Instead it's just credentialism and terrible creations.
12-tone serial composition is simply a technique for removing natural tonality from a composition.
I think the big issue is whether 12-tone approaches are used occasionally in a piece as an expressive tool, or as a "new way of life" where the entire composition is serial, and the listener is stuck in it. Or all of a composer's work is serial.
Which is what makes it... challenging.
It's the same with Minimalism.
But used in smaller doses, it's a powerful technique.
Here's an example, in Frank Zappa's "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" there's a little section that's a 12-tone piece, starting with the lyrics "We see in the back of the City Hall mind...". It's short, it's weird, and it works very well in context.
And in Zappa's "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast", the middle instrumental section, the first 20 notes are going up and down a simple C-Major scale... (What could be more tonal?)... and then he rips into a 12-tone row. The result is downright delightful.
> for removing natural tonality from a composition
Of course, nothing stops you from using the "removing natural tonality" trick in a way that's ultimately subordinate to broader tonal goals. For instance, a small tone row fragment can be used to set surprising tonal expectations and cleanly modulate to any key - even in a completely monophonic piece with no background harmony! It's just supposed to be a horizontal composing-out of some arbitrary set of notes, but this is also what makes it work within tonality as a pivot point.
(And if the atonal fragment can be snuck in initially as a melodic "variation" of motivic material from the piece, it needn't even surprise the listener as such - until, that is, they find themselves listening in a completely different key area and have to wonder "wait, how did that twist work?")
Shostakovich did this a lot in his later work. His violin sonata starts with a long slow atonal dirge, then suddenly slinks into this little tonal waltz. It gives a “haunted music box” vibe that I absolutely love.
Zappa is a great example of deploying 20th century avant classical into compelling compositions that an audience can latch onto.
For me the best example is ‘The Bebop Tango’ from his Roxy and Elsewhere album. The core melodic theme is extremely atonal and angular, but his arrangement and his band lean into it with such conviction and panaché that it is just as compelling as any rock show.
He pokes fun at it too later on in the recording when he solicits members of the audience to get up on stage and do dance solos while George Duke directs them from his keyboard.
Many of the composers were actually there in person.
I figured you knew what you were getting into, so it's no fair rejecting it all: give it a fair hearing, because that's what you came for.
About all I can say is, some of it wasn't too terrible. Novelty is, in itself, worth nothing at all. Is it beautiful, or isn't it?
It's tired and trite to mention how audiences used to reject something and now they love it. That's called Survivor Bias. We don't talk about all the things they rejected and were never heard again, or that never got performed at all.
I got turned on to Schoenberg as a teenager listening to his string quartets, though I never dug too deeply. As a punk rocker who was really into free jazz, his music spoke to me much more than other 'classical' composers. There's a great performance with Glen Gould and Yehudi Menuhin performing Phantasy for Violin and Piano (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AABQYAPK_Ek) Gould defends Schoenbergs compositions, Menuhin dislikes them for all the reasons most people do, and admits he is only playing it because he respects Gould so much. One of Gould's points is that the piece is specifically composed for violin - no other instrument could play it, whereas Bach pieces can be rearranged for any instrument. Bach is composing music in an abstract sense but Schoenberg is composing to the specific capabilities of the instrument.
There's another great monologue from Gould enumerating why Mozart was a "bad" composer, which I love to cite whenever I have to defend my dislike for the child genius.
I think I'm not alone in being convinced that atonality, dissonance and the likes are "effects". Same way that noise can be used to great effect in almost all genres of music but pure noise (e.g. Merzbow) is at best treated relaxing background noise or conversation piece when it's not enshrined in the emperor's new clothes discussion club's room.
Or like pepper or salt: using it with almost all food can improve it, but you're not daft and/or pretentious enough to serve a plate full of salt and call it an excellent dish that's just beyond the pleb's understanding, right?
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadThat created a lot of noise that's not of the compelling type. And while it's not so pretentious that, say, the music accidentally sounds outside of the human frequency range, it's pretentious enough to make non-musickers question whether there's really any there there.
Music cognition is still a young enough science to leave questions lingering about what is and isn't happening on a musical-perception level.
Also-- not sure I've ever seen this talked about, but music perception shares sensory apparatus with one's general sense of hearing. So challenging music with unfamiliar timbres and frequency combinations can be physically grating and overload the listener on that sensory level. It's difficult to be open to new, unfamiliar musical forms, and probably impossibly so if one is grumpy because the delivery format makes one feel as if the music is actively hurting one's ears.
That describes a lot of techno and heavy metal and a lot of people seem to really dig it.
This depends very heavily on which subgenre of techno you're talking about. Melodic techno tends to use functional harmony, yes. But there is a lot of techno out there that has no recognizable harmony at all. It may have a root note, but bass and/or melodic lines, if present at all, can be completely chromatic.
Rhythm is almost always 4/4, of course, but it's hard to deviate too far from that with dance music. Within that, techno tends to do a lot of interesting polymeter stuff. Whether you consider that traditional or not is, I guess, open to interpretation.
It's a worthless constraint. There is nothing you can do with tone rows - retrogrades, inversions, permutations, all of it - that you can't do in free atonality.
There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements.
As for popularity - you can find abstract expressionist paintings for sale on Etsy. You won't find much hard serial music on Bandcamp. And it's pretty easy to generate it with software now.
But most of all Schoenberg was trying too hard to be remembered. Bach, Mozart, Debussy and his predecessors saw themselves as jobbing composers. They knew they had to keep at least one ear moored in audience expectations.
Schoenberg desperately wanted to be remembered as a great innovator. He didn't care if audiences loved or hated the music, as long as his name was out there was an Important Composer.
Nothing of this sort happened except in very exceptional cases where it's very obvious and clearly intentional, such as Alban Berg (who chose adversarially tonal tone rows). Besides you assume the only benefit you get from serialism is atonality but that makes no sense because many composers used tonal rows too (i.e. tone rows with 7 or 9 pitch classes in the Major or Minor system). Not only that but different composers used serialism for different purposes.
You are however right that Schoenberg assumed 12 tone serialism implies some form of atonality, which is incorrect. Research shows that he had a bias towards atonal tone rows.
Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music. It's fair to classify this as the "art" part of writing serialistic pieces that theory is insufficient.
Besides all of this, traditional music theory teaching focuses too much on serialism as a "technique" and not enough as a "structure", which was the main point of Schoenberg. For example, Elliot Carter claims he doesn't intentionally use row vectors or row matrices in his compositions, but his works can certainly be analyzed and understood this way. It seems like for a minor subset of free atonal compositions serialism is the natural structure of this kind of music. This point is often missed.
I firmly disagree with your points about Schoenberg. I think he's one of the two gigantic innovators of music in 20th century: Philip Glass and him. (I understand this is extremely controversial, opinions are mine). It really takes a lot to make artistic statements so profound your works look misplaced in your canon but are still firmly part of it.
I still hold out hope that someday Harry Partch will get the recognition he deserves. If traditional Western harmony is played out, surely the obvious solution is adding more notes? It makes more sense to me than trying to wring out the last few drops of novelty using Schoenberg's ideas. Partch demonstrated that microtonal works can sound both pleasant and novel, but musicians are strangely resistant to the idea.
One exception is Sevish, who produces some of the most interesting electronic dance and ambient music I've heard. Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-JZhCWsk3M
I wish more musicians would compose stuff like this.
https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html
I am curious whether a better Live integration is going to lead to more usage.
What we see more and more of is an increased reliance on aspects that were previously less explored in the traditional (orchestral) Western music, such as texture and rhythm. Even in academic music, but mostly in cross-genre acoustic/electronic production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord
I guess it technically is? But to me it conveys something different.
For example, there's period performances of Bach pieces played in harpsichords tuned in just intonation. I'd not say that's microtonality.
But this sort of just intonation is not like barbershop, because all the intervals can be tolerably approximated with 12-equal temperament. The mood of the piece will change somewhat as some become more and some become less consonant, but it will remain essentially the same work. The barbershop seventh chord cannot be so approximated. The "ringing" sound of the seventh chord that defines the genre doesn't occur unless the seventh is tuned very noticeably flat from the closest 12-equal temperament equivalent. If you arpeggiate a barbershop seventh chord it sounds obviously microtonal.
If traditional Western literature is played out, surely the obvious solution is to add more letters to the alphabet?
Most of them are of little musical utility, but you could conceivably use and have opinions about them all. This is not possible with literature. There are far more than 2047 functionally distinct sentences, so there is no need to add more letters to the alphabet.
Unrelated but it reminded me of this [0] article discussed on HN a few times.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic...
You're omitting time. Harmonic perception is highly contextual. The way a chord sounds will depend heavily on the chords that precede it, so it's not just a question of enumerating the chords. You have to enumerate the chord progressions, and their rhythms. That's a much larger number.
There are ways to address this however. One can add small-scale atonal elements to an otherwise tonal work, in a way that can be understood by the ear. I think this may account for why Webern is perhaps the most popular among the atonal and serial composers: his works are small-scale enough that one can at least think about what grokking them musically may be like. Same for the 'freely atonal' works of early Schoenberg. So it was nowhere near the total failure some people might think it was, just not the be-all and end-all.
I am curious, why do you consider Glass a more innovative composer than, say, Reich? Reich's counterpoint and phase music seem to have pushed music forward more noticeably than Glass (outside of, perhaps, Einstein on the Beach).
Also you talk about counterpoint and incidentally early Glass sounds very contrapuntal (like early Reich) but I think a core message in Glass' body of works is that this entire bike shedding on harmony is so silly. There is so much to music beyond just pitch, and you can literally pick 4 chords and go crazy with it. He treats harmony as a solved problem. I think Reich would agree with this but I don't think his message is as profound. Think about Adams' "Harmonielehre" where he claims he wanted to combine minimalism and early 20th century harmony. The problem here I see here is that common practice harmony revolves around richness and variety. Fux himself says as much. It sounds gorgeous and new, but it doesn't go a long way to innovate anything. Although Glass' music sounds unserious, he actually tried to force himself to innovate. Which is what Schoenberg tried to do. Restrictions motivate artists to be creative.
Listen to Glass first string quartet, it was composed in 1966 before Reich's phase music.
[1] And of course his piano etudes but pianists insist they serve no pedagogical purpose, even though I still can't find someone who can actually play them well except Maki Namekawa. Roll eyes.
I disagree with this. Complexity is just harder to remember, it requires more attention and more iterations to remember it.
But weren't audience expectations tainted by the musical establishment? Debussy (born 1862) won the Prix de Rome, but somehow Ravel (born 1875, one year after Schoenberg) was snubbed for five consecutive years.
Something terrible seems to have happened in music schools around the turn of the century. It's hard to blame Schoenberg for wanting to watch it all burn.
These days I don't willingly listen to atonal music of the Shoenberg/Carter/Boulez variety. I have a variety of theories about why modern classical music tends to be rejected, but in the end, all I can really say is that I have a subjective response to, say, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, that's entirely different from his Movements for Piano & Orchestra.
I really like your point with respect to "Rite of Spring" vs his "Movements for Piano & Orchestra". But let's please note that he likely never attempted to invoke the same kind of vibe anyway, so I don't think it really proves anything. The reality is, composers used serialistic techniques for something other than what neoclassicists wanted to create. For a better comparison, compare Elliot Carter's late piano works with his first piano sonata, which he wanted to write in neoclassical style. You can see the same Carter hue (that's likely more similar to "Movements for Piano & Orchestra" than Stravinsky's "Violin Concerto") in both so it's a more direct comparison in my very humble opinion.
With respect to:
> why modern classical music tends to be rejected
I find this claim that contemporary Western classical music is irrelevant wrong. I think its cultural force is significant. I wrote more about this in HN here [1] if you care to read. But in short, just because an artistic movement inspires artists and not the audience, it doesn't mean it won't indirectly impact the audience, since artists who will go and create mainstream art may be inspired by the innovators of their era.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37424409
Ironically, the current period of music is starting to be called "postmodern" music, but it's returning a bit to the harmonic aesthetics of the romantic period (not purely, it's mixed with music from around the world as well as jazz and pop/rock ideas) and innovating more around music production technology - like adding electronics to the orchestra and experimenting with microtonal instruments - rather than trying to innovate on the concept of harmony itself. I would assume that this is in no small part due to the influence of film scoring, which is largely considered pedestrian by hardcore modernists, on the new generation of composers.
By the way, I happen to like a lot of the modernist stuff that I am rejecting here, but I think that's more out of familiarity (through study) than anything else.
I got that from Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, an accessible history of 20th century composition. I went in ready to dislike Schoenberg but I walked away pretty charmed with him. I don't enjoy listening to any of his serial pieces, but I loved the twinkly little notes that play in Zelda BOTW when you're riding your horse. I don't claim that there's a _direct_ line from 12 tone rows to that, but overall I like living in the post-Schoenberg world where I hear a lot of the "intrepid elements of atonality, pointillist riffs" that the Atlantic author points to.
You can make exactly the same case about tonal voice leading rules too. Rules are a "pointless conceit" by definition. "Free atonality" can, again by definition, do anything it wants, including emiting a J. S. Bach fugue or whatever. This is a tautological case.
In fact the whole point to music is rules. We have expectations about what we hear and how that works and what it means, and you write "new" music by breaking or bending just a few of them, or otherwise finding ways to do stuff other people haven't.
And Schoenberg was trying to find a way to write a new set of rules. It didn't catch on, for the most part, but it wasn't "pointless". You can hear tone rows and learn the rules and "understand" a 12-tone piece in ways that you can't for arbitrary noise. And that's kinda cool.
You really can't. They aren't laws of nature, but they are based on observation: "When I have two voices proceed in parallel fifths, it's as though one voice ceased to have an independent character. Unless I want that effect, I should avoid that." "When I frustrate a leading tone, it makes the harmonic effect less clear."
Schoenberg's system starts with the arbitrary: pick a tone row and use it! But there are rules based on observation there, too: if you use tonal constructions in atonal music, it frustrates the listener's expectations, so don't do that. The ear can recognize the rows when transposed, reversed, and altered by other techniques, so those are good. Serialism is less fully-developed and lacks the deep cultural background of tonal music, but it's not entirely arbitrary either.
This is partly true, but that rule (as with many other rules of strict composition) originated with purely vocal music which had to be made easy to sing. There's plenty of music for instruments like the piano or the guitar (even literate music, starting from the early 20th c. or so) where consecutive fifths are played all the time and such a "blending" effect is not really heard. Probably a result of timbre (these instruments have a bit of perceptual "roughness" to them that helps prevent a blended tone) as well as musical context (when consecutive fifths are just part of the music, that kind of sound is expected and easier to understand for the listener).
Saying there's nothing you can't do in serialism you can't do in free atonality seems unfair. Firstly free atonality came about after integral serialism. Secondly, there's nothing you can do in any type of musical composition that you can't do in free atonality, so you may as well say all the things you can do with functional harmony are a worthless constraint.
As for popularity - I personally don't think that's an important characteristic at all, but if you do, there are lots of serialist works that are very popular (eg Wozzeck[1]).
[1] And I deliberately chose that one rather than say Berg's violin concerto which is also very popular because that's one of the ones that you're accusing of mining serialism for tonal elements
As someone who studied art and film I found that even extremely powerful experimental works of music, art or film will have critics like these. Don't get me wrong: One doesn't has to like every piece of art. But even without liking it one could still respect the expression, the craft, the energy and/or the thought contained within a work. There is a lot of great art that I don't like.
The problem many people have with these modern things is that they think of art as something one can "parse" into a specific intended meaning. So once you encounter unparseable art, chances are you will feel stupid. Or worse, you feel the artwork "calls" you stupid.
But a lot of art simply is, while the intention is completely secondary. Nobody would look at a nice sunset and be upset at the fact that it doesn't have a clear meaning behind it. This lack of meaning is very easy to ignore with art which you think is nice (e.g. a painting of said sunset). For more art-headed people the same painting of a sunset would be boring, or even kitsch — what does the painting show, that I couldn't see better in real and nature? Then I'd rather see something completely unseen, a new painting technique, a motive I have never thought about etc.
I no longer feel that way at all. I don't know what flipped. It may have been learning that Lynch primarily considers himself a painter and he also does a lot of sculpture. He just makes movies and television shows because those are better at paying the bills. But it seemed pretty obvious after comparing the differences between all of the extended universe novelization material Mark Frost produced related to Twin Peaks with David Lynch's answers when asked if any of that is canon when he just says he doesn't care and doesn't even know what the extra content is.
There is no hidden meaning I was failing to get. Lynch isn't trying to say anything at all. Was Dale Cooper literally living in a dream the whole time? It doesn't matter. He's just a painter but film happens to be his medium. He's creating impressions, in a series sufficiently coherent from one to the next that it can be considered a story, but it's not like reading Robert Jordan or something. There is no vast encyclopedia of notes and in-universe history where what was really happening the whole time is explained. It's just impressionism on film. At some point, I became okay with that and stopped falling into the Reddit fan-theory holes with everything I watch. It became okay to just appreciate the quality of the images and acting performances and realize this is fiction. It doesn't have to be constrained by the logical causal physics of reality. It can tell stories with dream logic even if the point of that isn't to say you're literally watching the dreams of another person who inhabits some physically real world that you aren't shown.
The answer is: who cares — they bring something to the painting, and no explaination would greatly change that. Maybe a definite explaination would even hurt the mystery and thus the reception.
The value of some art lies in what it means to you, the mental doors it opens or the emotions it tingles. All of this can be so subjective that any explaination is ultimately without any real value.
Sure it is interesting to know if Van Gogh used those birds elsewhere, or what they might represent for himself, with his moving biography. But when I am looking at that picture, all of that is not important.
No, I think that is a prejudice of people who think they are better at appreciating art than others.
Normal people like abstract art, experimental music, and other stuff that is different and open for interpretation – as long as it's good.
But they don't like subpar productions made by talentless people, just because these people have gone through all the superficial rites of becoming "artists" and have a community of group-narcissists to feed on.
I think that misses that a lot of "challenging" music that isn't Schoenberg is very widely accepted. Composers like Glass or Cage are popular enough to be used in film soundtracks.
I don't think there's necessary anything about music over visyal arts that means people don't like "challenging" or "experimental" music, but Schoenberg for whatever reason hasn't ever reached a wide level of popularity.
Music is different to other art forms.
Not everyone likes dance, not everyone likes paintings, not everyone likes theatre, not everyone likes sculpture, not everyone likes poetry.
But EVERYONE likes music.
Its fundamental. So when its challenging music, its challenging in a more fundamental way than a painting can be challenging.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_anhedonia
They're seeking familiarity, comfort, joy -- which are hard to find in "challenging" music, whether that's genres that they don't care for or more experimental music that defies conventions.
The lead character is an avant-garde composer, with a strong belief in the importance of his work, ignoring (as best he can) the mockery of others, and resisting the calls from most of those who care about him to use some melody in his work.
And while I don’t begrudge the individual composers and performers who do make this sort of music - they are of course free to follow their own curiosity and passions - it does upset me a bit that this where “classical” music has ended up. It feels like the academics have hijacked the genre to the detriment of casual listeners.
[1] https://youtu.be/cYEke4EsJYM
I'm sorry to say this but there is no such thing as "needlessly avant garde" in Western classical music tradition imho. WCM is about an artist finding his own sound, finding a unique musical language that puts them in the continuum all the way from Bach to him. If your music is not avant garde, it may be great music, but it's not going to be good WCM music. This is just my humble opinion. I almost exclusively listen to contemporary WCM these days, and the way I engage with WCM is different than the way I engage with other genres of music.
Put it as film analogy, the goal is not to make the best horror movie, the best drama, the best scifi; the goal is to make the most creative/innovative/novel/personal/weird movie that happens to be horror, that happens to be drama, that happens to be scifi. At least that's how I enjoy WCM. Everybody experiences music differently, which is what makes it one of the most beautiful human phenomena.
So in short, the more avant garde the better. Note that Schoenberg's music is already grandpa's grandpa music. We want innovation that goes well well beyond Schoenberg. I would consider 12 tone row music ancient at this point, not even remotely avant garde/experimental.
I myself just feel lucky that I can enjoy most of this "challenging" music without needing to care about the magnificently strict structure, or how the composer wanted to channel God or something. All I ask is that people not question my sanity on the grounds of my liking of this kind of music.
How many people who perceive classical music as elitist actually have a personal experience of someone on the "inside" acting elitist and shunning them as "outsiders"?
(There's actually no reason nowadays why this published "popular" music shouldn't become a part of the literate canon that's researched academically etc. But that only adds to a very long list of individual composers and entire musical traditions that end up being broadly neglected by standard academic POV's. It's also a general problem wrt. the study of human art and culture.)
Sacred classical music was accessible to poor people in big cities. Secular classical music was less accessible though.
I wonder if the cost and competitiveness of the training has something to do with the problem. The people who can win auditions are in fact elite musicians, and are almost exclusively from affluent families.
I enjoy the challenging music too, in the jazz genre. Given that I'm not trying to make a living at it, I'm grateful for the fact that I can play for a tiny but appreciative and loyal audience. I think there are a lot of niche genres that are sustained largely by amateurs and hobbyists.
One could say that for Mozart or Bach (or the Beatles or Miles Davis or Bieber) just as well, as the argument basically amounts to personal taste, doesn't it?
We forget that although there are many surviving transcripts of their work, Mozart and Beethoven also improvised and performed on stage a lot. That whole genre of classical music is lost.
I'm sure many artists fall into the trap of 'the public likes the work I like least'. That doesn't make the work not part of the authors creation. For example, Raffi makes extremely popular (and actually pretty good) music and I'm sure he absolutely hates having to play it over and over again. Still a better artist than Schoenberg.
Schoenberg and his followers are dancing to a different tune, and that’s fine for them, but at this point it’s pretty clear that they will at best be remembered for their tangential effects on composers of actually beloved music.
Not to mention Bach had to regain popularity through Mendelsshon.
This is debatable to say the least. Lovers of the avant-garde commonly trot out the argument that there's just no room for genuine, transformative innovation within the mainstream that can be grokked by average folk, that it is played out in some sense. And lovers of mainstream music (and arguably mainstream culture more generally) routinely prove them wrong, by managing to innovate within those boundaries in a way that's genuinely compelling to many. It happens again and again.
avant-garde composers were playing with recording and editing techniques for a long time before the beatles came and used those ideas in a more catchy way, with a hairstyle to boot. The innovation is closer to the business side than to the music itself.
Oh, I must have gotten lost. I thought I was in a forum dedicated to hacking where a post had been submitted to justify the importance of a composer almost universally found difficult to listen to to a mainstream audience. Probably took a wrong turn somewhere.
> Who cares?
Whoever posted the story here clearly did one way or another. Everyone who commented, both of us included, as well. Affecting detachment while taking the time to clearly post how detached one is is not very convincing.
I care about the music, people should be more open to hearing challenging music. That doesn't necessarily mean "the mainstream", that entails a whole cabal of mechanisms at play that go beyond what an individual chooses to listen and how.
Also many now revered composers were shunned by audiences of their time, such as Mahler.
Bach is now regarded as the greatest composer but he wasn't exactly popular during his life outside select circles.
That's fine. That's all their right, even the last bit. I'm hardly in a position to insist that disliking, or at the very least distrusting, something when the only thing I know about it is that it is popular is invalid myself. We take very different approaches to that, but I can't deny what I do is close enough that it would be hypocritical to criticize too much.
But it is pretty stupid to write handwringing articles about "Why don't they like us?" You collectively wrote music that blares in every tone that you don't want normies to like you. You chased them away for decades. You collectively berated and mocked them in both words and music.
What did you collectively expect?
I suppose those who joined in the process late and learned the methods of disdain without the reason underlying them might be confused, but I can promise those people that there is no scenario where the common person suddenly acquires a taste for music that basically musically reads as "screw the common person and everything they stand for", in addition to whatever else it may be saying.
If you want the normies to like you, you are going to have to at least inch closer to them first. Maybe the normies could use some mind-expansion, but right now you are so far away from where the normies are that you are barely on the same planet.
You don't want to. You're not going to. That's fine. All I'm really asking for is for you to stop being surprised about the results. When you tell people to fuck off, they do.
I assume the wording "classical contemporary" is deliberate, but it sounds all wrong. Shouldn't it be "contemporary classical" aka "modern classical"?
They also use it once in the article. Is this a widely used naming convention for this type of music?
For a similar historical nomenclature, see the musical style ars nova or "new art." Ars nova continues to be called ars nova, even though the music was written in the 14th century.
The article is making the case for challenging music. You pointed out that Brubeck made challenging music (i.e. 5/4) accessible to most people. My argument is that this is a poor example as 5/4 is not that of a challenging time signature, and most non-musicians who heard Take Five probably didn't even perceive the uncommon 5/4, and just enjoyed the tune. 5/4 is popular in progressive rock, post rock, and electronic music. In my experience most people do not pay attention to that. Similar to 3/4 - it's an uncommon but easy time signature that people in the Western world have no problem with. Basically, there is no challenge.
Yet another best thing Dave Brubeck never wrote.
"I Will Always Love You" BY Whitney Houston
"Fuck You" BY Cee Lo Green
I win. Try again next time. Bye.
It does not matter. Here's some reasons why:
- You can change it at any point. Re-tune your orchestra. Pitch bend your mp3 file in Audacity. It's free to change your mind. Decisions which are free to change do not matter.
- Most humans basically don't notice it. The very few that do have a good enough ear to notice it will forget about it within seconds unless your song is extremely boring. If your listeners are focusing on a 2% difference in tuning instead of the content of your song, your song sucks.
- Written scores literally do not specify it; that's how little it matters. People do not have this in mind when they write music because it doesn't matter. They write the tempo, the key signature, the exact notes, but they don't write the exact tuning of A4. They don't care.
https://roelsworld.eu/432-tuning/the-scale-of-fifths/ this goes far more in depth
It’s ultimately just preference though. To that end some symphonies use other options, ny philharmonic uses 442, Boston symphony 441, etc. When I marched and teched drum corp we did 442 because that’s what the marimbas were tuned to plus we performed outside in the cold so going up a touch helped as the cold would generally pull everything flat.
He tells a story about stopping at a red light next to a woman who was absolutely jamming out to some hip-hop song. Her car is shaking, she's shouting the lyrics with a big smile on her face, just completely engrossed in this music that everyone who considers themself a "composer" would turn their nose up at; not "real music", of course. And he thought: I would be elated if I pulled up and saw someone connecting like that to my music. Isn't that why I got into composing in the first place? To bring about that in people? Why else would you want to be a composer? To join the circle-jerk and feel infinitely superior to all those stupid normies?
Many of these composers write this way because they simply cannot write tonal music well. It's too hard. Writing music with original colors and style, but is still tonal and still resonates with actual human beings? That's tremendously difficult. Avant-garde composers avoid doing this because they can't. They write atonal shit because it's much, much easier.
The idea is that you've failed as a composer if the "common man" can relate at all to your music is one of the most elitist attitudes a human can possibly hold. Normal listeners' brains are so far beneath yours that if they can recognize any form of structure, melody, or harmony at all in your music, then it must be trash normie music. It's the exact premise of the Emperor's New Clothes story and it's amazing how long this bubble has lasted. Shame on everyone who thinks this way.
Imagine being the one who takes these "challenging" musical ideas and presents them in a way that listeners can actually intuitively understand. Imagine pulling in listeners with what they know, and then taking them on a journey into the previously unknown, and having them be with you the whole time. Now that's a damn-good modern composer! Of course, the vast majority of modern composers would wallow in despair if such a thing happened to their big-brained magnum opus -- normies understanding their music!?
12-tone serial composition is simply a technique for removing natural tonality from a composition.
I think the big issue is whether 12-tone approaches are used occasionally in a piece as an expressive tool, or as a "new way of life" where the entire composition is serial, and the listener is stuck in it. Or all of a composer's work is serial.
Which is what makes it... challenging.
It's the same with Minimalism.
But used in smaller doses, it's a powerful technique.
Here's an example, in Frank Zappa's "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" there's a little section that's a 12-tone piece, starting with the lyrics "We see in the back of the City Hall mind...". It's short, it's weird, and it works very well in context.
And in Zappa's "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast", the middle instrumental section, the first 20 notes are going up and down a simple C-Major scale... (What could be more tonal?)... and then he rips into a 12-tone row. The result is downright delightful.
Of course, nothing stops you from using the "removing natural tonality" trick in a way that's ultimately subordinate to broader tonal goals. For instance, a small tone row fragment can be used to set surprising tonal expectations and cleanly modulate to any key - even in a completely monophonic piece with no background harmony! It's just supposed to be a horizontal composing-out of some arbitrary set of notes, but this is also what makes it work within tonality as a pivot point.
(And if the atonal fragment can be snuck in initially as a melodic "variation" of motivic material from the piece, it needn't even surprise the listener as such - until, that is, they find themselves listening in a completely different key area and have to wonder "wait, how did that twist work?")
For me the best example is ‘The Bebop Tango’ from his Roxy and Elsewhere album. The core melodic theme is extremely atonal and angular, but his arrangement and his band lean into it with such conviction and panaché that it is just as compelling as any rock show.
He pokes fun at it too later on in the recording when he solicits members of the audience to get up on stage and do dance solos while George Duke directs them from his keyboard.
That album is the height of Zappa for me.
https://cabrillomusic.org/2023-season/
Many of the composers were actually there in person.
I figured you knew what you were getting into, so it's no fair rejecting it all: give it a fair hearing, because that's what you came for.
About all I can say is, some of it wasn't too terrible. Novelty is, in itself, worth nothing at all. Is it beautiful, or isn't it?
It's tired and trite to mention how audiences used to reject something and now they love it. That's called Survivor Bias. We don't talk about all the things they rejected and were never heard again, or that never got performed at all.
Or like pepper or salt: using it with almost all food can improve it, but you're not daft and/or pretentious enough to serve a plate full of salt and call it an excellent dish that's just beyond the pleb's understanding, right?